The typical home environment includes a number of various users, such as family members, with different interests in multimedia content. Such a typical home environment often includes access to television programming content through a cable service or through a satellite dish service, which can provide television programming to various television devices within the home. A digital video recorder device can also be included in the home system to store recorded video content from the television service. In addition, the typical home environment also often includes an access point for Internet access in the home, such as a cable modem or dial-up service, to provide Internet service to various computers and Internet-enabled devices used within the home. In this manner, multimedia content in the form of television program content, Internet content, stored music and images can exist within a home environment, but not in a coordinated fashion in which specific content is correlated to particular devices in the home or to particular users.
Users within a home, network, or community each own various devices capable of playing multimedia content, such as televisions, computers and mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones. When one user wishes to share content with another user, either within the same home, network, or community, or with users outside of them, the user typically has to speak with the others personally, send an email, call the others, or send an instant message. The other users may not be able to find the content or have access to it. The sharing of content in this manner is cumbersome and inefficient.
Problems also exist when the user wishes to switch content from one device to another of the user's devices. For example, the user may begin watching content at a TV and may wish to continue watching the content on a mobile device when the user leaves the house. In the current state of the art, the user is required to find a separate stream for the content that can be played on the mobile device. The user additionally has to find the location within the content where he left off.
In the current typical home environment, it is difficult and cumbersome for one of the users, such as a parent, to monitor or control the access to multimedia content by another user, such as a child. For example, current television systems allow a parent to block particular channels ahead of time, but do not provide the ability for a parent to remotely grant permission for a child to watch a particular program upon request by the child at the time the program is being shown. Also, the only way for a parent to monitor what the child is currently viewing is for the parent to physically be present near the device that the child is viewing.
Thus, devices within a home, network, or community are not integrated so that multimedia content can be coordinated between devices and users. Accordingly, there exists a need for an integrated personal content access system and method.